08-31-2026
Joe Wilkins
INSTRUCTIONS FOR POOR WHITE COUNTRY BOYS WISHING TO BE POETS
after Nikky Finney
Be siphon. Be shovel. Be ditch magician. Water
here, water there. Be in the dirty water a spool of snakes
essing off everywhichway. Or the greasy crease
in your grandfather's slouch hat, the flyswatter snap
in your mother's hot hand. Be ten hours of back-break,
tamp & crank. Zerkgun, cutterbar, comealong. Get
down in the dirt & dig. Know you're getting
you'll never know quite where. Listen to Waylon
& get weepy. What all else Emmy Lou will learn you.
Carry in your pocket like your sausage-fingered daddy did
a pen. Dogear every page, if you have to. Then reckon all
your bad ancestors, memorize the thankgod stories
otherwise. Thirsty? Lucky you, you got the look of fencewire
& trees to drink. But for all the boiled coffee & cigarettes
be careful when you kiss.
MY SON ASKS FOR THE STORY ABOUT WHEN WE WERE BIRDS
When we were birds,
we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped—
it's true, we flew. When we were birds,
we dined on tiny silver fish
& the watery hearts
of flowers. When we were birds
we sistered the dragonfly,
brothered the night-wise bat,
& sometimes when we were birds
we rose as high as we could go—
light cold & strange—
& when we opened our beaked mouths
sundown poured like wine
down our throats.
When we were birds
we worshipped trees, rivers, mountains,
sage knots, rain, gizzard rocks, grub-shot dung piles,
& like all good beasts & wise green things
the mothering sun. We had many gods
when we were birds,
& each in her own way
was good to us, even winter fog,
which found us huddling
in salal or silk tassel,
singing low, sweet songs & closing
our blood-rich eyes & sleeping
the troubled sleep of birds. Yes,
even when we were birds
we were sometimes troubled & tired,
sad for no reason,
& so pretended we were not birds
& fell like stones—
the earth hurtling up to meet us,
our trussed bones readying
to be shattered, our unusually large hearts
pounding for nothing—
yet at the last minute we would flap
& lift, & as we flew, shudderingly away,
we told ourselves that this falling—
we would remember. We thought
we would always
be birds. We didn't know.
We didn't know
we could love one another
with such ferocity. That we should.
THE WRECKED
The victim, who is now 27, told authorities that both brothers [W.C. and R.C.] would threaten and blackmail her in order to continue the abuse. W.C. raped the victim when she was 13, according to charging documents. The victim said she told R.C. about the rape and he told her: “They did it to me, too.” -KTVQ.com, CBS affiliate, Billings, Montana
-
Invocation
The light in the lengths
of my bones, in the true densities—
I’ve tried to keep it there,
housed & held,
but this December
toeing the dirty, crystalline freeze
along the edge of the highway,
the chill air hisses
through my ribs, the corners of my eyes—
& the light reddens, flares.
II. Procession of Mourners
I’m talking about a gravel road,
an interminable afternoon
in the far, dry reaches—
eastern Montana, light filling
the cracked windshield
as we drove godbent
into cow-burnt, chemical hills,
the beetle-sick shadows of jackpines
our burden & birthright—
this the geyser light
we sucked from holes punched
in the hides of aluminum cans,
the saltpeter light wafting
from a jangle of hot, gold shells,
the last light whistling
through our empty hands.
III. In Praise of the Dead
That black night down Ragged Point,
when near to crying over a girl
I hadn't told anyone else I loved
I drove like an idiot off the road
& stuck my Tercel in the gumbo of the bar ditch—
my friend, the one who could barely read,
who could whistle like a meadowlark,
who told me once not to worry
the older boys called me faggot & book fucker,
my friend R.C.,
he grinned & said let’s go,
& through the exactly nowhere dark of rural America
we walked the six miles to the highway.
I can see the two of us yet,
kicking rocks down the midnight road,
trading beneath the salt of stars
stories & wishes, edging
toward each other’s sorrows,
stilling to silence
when before us an owl’s whisper-wings
ribboned the dark. Even now
I want to believe the wrecked
might rescue one another. For a night.
A day's worth of light.
IV. Digression, Invective
The last time I saw R.C. he must have been up over two hundred & fifty pounds, a t-shirt with something stupid on it stretched to the fibers across his belly. He kept telling me he had to get to Roundup, that he had to meet someone in Roundup. His eyes wheeled in their dark sockets. This was at the old house, the last Christmas before my mother sold the farm, lights in the tree, bits of ribbon on the floor. I asked if he didn’t want something to eat first. Maybe a glass of water. He just got up & left. Fifteen years on, I click the link & the light burns through my bones, an unreadable alphabet of sickle moons & arrows, the slashes that denote curses rising to smoke on my skin. Water, but what water could I ever wash him with? What wish might I trade that before he took her to that terrible place (before they took him to that terrible place) he might like the thousand stars we named that night burn & even when he’s thankgod dead & ash & gone forever keep burning?
V. Bewilderment
The next day we borrowed
a neighbor’s flatbed
& scrounged a greasy length of chain.
We bent the fender, but we did it—
we hauled the Tercel out of the ditch.
Later that summer, the day before
I left for college, left Montana
not knowing & knowing I’d never
come back, I sold him my Toyota
for a dollar. He had a job lined up
in Billings, was talking night classes
at the vo-tech. He needed wheels.
I leaned on the hail-pocked hood
& wrote the title over. It was his first car.
He started crying, tears pooling
in that dark star on his jaw,
where his old man had punched him
with a cigarette. It sounds stupid,
but I felt it, it’s true—
anything was possible, the light
rivering the sky, pouring
like all the world’s wishes
into our eyes.
-from When We Were Birds
Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers; and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Firecracker Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Wilkins has won the Oregon Book Award, the Montana Book Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and four High Plains Book Awards. His latest book is Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family. Born and raised north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, he lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon. You can find him online at https://joewilkins.org/ and https://joewilkinswriter.substack.com/.
